How to Download an Instagram Carousel — Every Slide, Full Quality
Carousels — posts with multiple photos or videos you swipe through — are the single most annoying thing to download from Instagram. Single photos are easy; carousels fight back. Most downloader websites grab only the first slide and call it done. Here's how to get every slide, in original quality, two ways.
Why carousels are hard
Instagram loads carousel slides lazily — slides you haven't swiped to may not even be loaded by your browser yet — and each slide is a separate media file (some photos, some videos, mixed in one post). Any tool that just scrapes "the image on the page" gets slide one and nothing else. A proper download means collecting each slide's own full-resolution URL.
Method 1: Chrome DevTools (free, manual)
You can do it by hand with the browser's built-in developer tools:
- Open the carousel post in Chrome and press F12 → Network tab.
- Filter by Img (use Media for video slides).
- Now swipe through the carousel slide by slide — as each slide loads, its full-size file appears in the request list (large files from
cdninstagram.com). - For each slide: click the request → Open in new tab → right-click → Save image as… (or Save video as…).
- Repeat until you've swiped and saved every slide.
It genuinely works, and the files are the full-quality originals. But be honest with yourself about the workflow: a 10-slide carousel means ten rounds of swipe → find request → open → save → rename, because everything comes out named like 487213985_n.jpg. One carousel, fine. A profile full of them, no.
(If you want the deeper version of this technique — including how to handle chunked video URLs — see our full DevTools download guide.)
Method 2: One click with an extension
Super Downloader was built with carousels as a first-class case: hover any post and click download, and it captures every slide — photos and videos both — in the highest quality Instagram serves, properly grouped so a 10-slide post lands as ten sensibly named files in one folder. It works the same on a single post or when bulk-downloading a whole profile (where skipped carousel slides are exactly what other tools silently lose). Free, no login, runs entirely in your browser.
Quick answers
- Does quality drop? No — both methods above pull the original CDN files, not screenshots or re-compressed copies.
- Can I download mixed photo+video carousels? Yes; in DevTools you'll switch between the Img and Media filters, the extension just handles both.
- Does the poster get notified? No. Instagram doesn't notify anyone about downloads or screenshots of posts.
- Private accounts? Only content you can legitimately see while logged in as yourself. Nothing can (or should) bypass that.
As always: save for personal use, and if you want to repost someone's work, ask them — a downloaded carousel is still their carousel.